


Scraps of Doctor Who fic

by honeynoir (bracelets), impossiblesnogbox (bracelets)



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s06e07 A Good Man Goes to War, F/M, Gen, Pete's World
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 5,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5961925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bracelets/pseuds/honeynoir, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bracelets/pseuds/impossiblesnogbox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scraps (drabbles/ficlets) that never grew long enough or weren't published for some other reason, foisted upon you because I like them. Various characters/ships/ratings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. River & an OC

**Author's Note:**

> River and an OC. From 2010.

“Tell me something funny. Something to take my mind off this,” said Blu. She motioned in the direction of her face, where puffy and bruised skin (the varying colours of which were visible even in the mood light) cemented her right eye shut. “This watered-down rubbish isn’t working.”

River leaned back in her lumpy seat. The worst table in a seedy bar and she was actually grateful (talk about lowering standards), but this was not a night to teeter on stools. “What’s not funny about a dozen archaeologists resorting to fists over a find?”

Blu raised a brow, winced in pain. “Well, _you_ would think that, starting it.”

“I ended it, too.”

“I’m glad you were on my side.”

This was not a time to pat herself on the back, so in lieu of answering she finally took a sip of her own drink. There was really only spirits and red dye in the glass, but it went down. “Might not feel like it now, but you asked for my help and it’ll be worth it.”

“All right, tell me a secret, then.” Grimacing, Blu pushed her dark let’s-call-it-a-fringe aside. “Something unexpected.”

“Well…” River traced a pattern in the condensation on her glass. “Did you know I’m married?”

Blu choked on her drink; coughed, then swallowed bravely. “That was unexpected. Married? Like, conventionally?”

Shrugging, River fought back a smile. “I’m not conventional.”

“That was my point.”

“I know.”

“Husband?”

“Usually.”

”What does he do?” Blu struggled wrapping her tongue around all the syllables of the next word, and after a few false starts she managed: “Archaeology?” 

“The opposite.”

Frowning, the other woman wrapped her hands around her glass. She was not a sharp drunk. Apparently she decided changing the subject would be better than worrying her head. “Was that what you did when you had that hour off last week?”

River laughed, too much; sharp pains shot through her bruised jaw. “Oh, it’s been forever.”

“But you’ve never mentioned – you’ve always – you _flirt_. You and I –”

“Of course I flirt.” River took another sip, caught a shard of ice in her teeth and didn’t answer until it had melted. Made a mental note never to introduce Blu to the 50th century. “I guess I’ll have to say it’s complicated.”

“Proper exla – exna – explanation, please.”

“Later, perhaps. Now, shut up – we have makeup to apply and a black market to visit.”

“Black market?”

“You asked for my help,” said River, shrugging, “and that way is fastest.”

“Ooor un-con-ven-tio-nal,” slurred Blu, her eyes glittering. “I hope it’s worth a black eye and a secret.”


	2. Martha + John Smith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Martha & John Smith. Missing scene from that time he fell down the stairs.

“Let me – Can I feel?”

He shrinks back in his seat. “Nurse Redfern has prodded quite enough already, Martha. It’s highly uncomfortable.”

He really could hit a whiny note when he wanted to. Martha tries to get a good look at his pupils, leaning much too far into his personal space; but his eyes keep darting about. “Please, Mr Smith?”

“Oh, if you must. I never knew you could be so – so macabre.”

“Well, I am. And I think you should take the day off. Sir.”

“Matron said I didn’t have to,” he says, but he does lean forward, offering her access to the back of his head. “Said it isn’t as bad as it – well, feels.”

She moves around the chair; runs her fingers through his masses of hair; feels the edge of the laceration, the bump, the warmth of inflammation. Her hands are swollen and stiff and dry from scrubbing floors and she fumbles; Smith fidgets and whimpers. _Yes, right._ Not the Doctor. John Smith. With a prick of malice she has to concede that the Matron had been correct.


	3. Eleven post-S5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eleven and the Crack, idek. Post-S5. Might have been dark!Doctor, but not sure.

It’s not so easy now, is it? This time around.

You can’t trace this crack in the Universe and it won’t cut at your fingertips and it will not tantalise you and you’re not so sure it even exists. But it does, of course it does. It must. 

You see them often, the changes it’s made, when you close your eyes or in the back of your mind, or indeed, when your eyes are open.

It’s nice and neat and compartmentalised. If only things weren’t so jagged. Unsharp jags that don’t cut, but chafe and discomfort you.

There’s Amy in a tattered veil. Her hair is so so red and she’s barefoot and she, perpetually, looks like she’s ready to bite.

There’s Rory. He sits, always, so still. You can’t be sure whether he’s plastic or not.

River’s empty. You have to get her back soon. She’s lost in space and time, poor thing. The jagged door (it can be called a door, no? if it is a figment of imagination it still has to be what you want it to be) ajar. It’s looks welcoming, you think. She’ll want to come back.


	4. Eight & Romana II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eight & Romana II.

The very nearly last place in the Multiverse Romana expected to find the Doctor was a retirement home. And yet she spots his TARDIS in a garden, next to a gurgling brook; finds him fifty floors above it, on a bench on a balcony; with his feet on the railing.

”I’ve retired,” he says. ”For the weekend. Thought I’d try it out… Again.”

She frowns, gathers her robes around her and sits down on the edge of the bench. “Whatever for?”

“See, I tell people I’m taking the weekend off to watch the satellites dance, they keep bothering me. Keep sending me messages. Like I don’t _mean_ it. Retirement is more final.”

“People?”

“You know – UNIT, Galileo, New Scotland Yard in Space… I’ve been here six times before, and every single time I was interrupted before the dance. And the dance, Romana, is the _point_.”

“How unbearably tragic.”

“Finally, I told them I was retired.”

“And?”

“And here _you_ are.”

“I’ve come to see the satellites dance, too. I’m old enough.”

 

“That,” she says, four minutes and thirty-four seconds later, “ was a bit anticlimactic.”

The Doctor hums noncommittally. “Then you might as well tell me.”

She reaches into her tiny purse and withdraws a Dalek eye stalk. “One of the satellites is a Dalek probe.”

“Well, we can’t have that.”


	5. Eleven/River

A half-drunken man stumbles down the street, away from a small explosion; the Doctor runs past him, up the street, toward the small explosion.

It comes from a pub, empty now, its door wide open. 

But there is no fire, and no smoke.

“It was just a noise bomb, Doctor.”

He turns, and there is River. Just standing there on the cobblestones, bag in hand.

“ _River_! he spits, and very nearly chokes on his reprimands.

She quirks her lips and hooks a thumb into the air. “Can a girl get a lift?”

 

*

“You set off a fake bomb!” 

“You run towards explosions. And I waited until everyone had left – well, except for the rude man who wouldn’t give me his seat.”

“What about the barman?”

“Out back.” She smiles, and he notices the remains of lipstick.

“Why?”

“I know you’re alone.”

“Well, I’m _not_!”

“No companion at the moment. Have you started talking to yourself yet?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Besides, I haven’t travelled with this you yet.”

*

“Don’t repair the TARDIS. Don’t repair the TARDIS without asking me! Just – don’t repair the TARDIS.”

“Feel free,” she says, “to vent your unrighterous anger and misplaced frustration, I couldn’t care less.”

 

*

She sits in his favourite armchair in her pyjamas and flips through her journal lazily.

He looks on miserably. “I’d rather you not flaunt that in my presence.”

“Just keep your hands off it, it’s not that hard.”

He turns around and leaves, and with a dull ache in his chest, she remembers that, yes, he used to find it hard, this early.

*

She’s brought a jar of her favourite bath salt; it smells divinely of strawberry and vanilla and would have cost her a ridiculous amount of money, had she not stolen it. He snatches it and uses it as a solvent in some obscure part of machinery River is quite certain he’s never ever needed.

*

She cooks breakfast – eggs Benedict – and he spits them out.

*

She’s working on an article, a mind-numbingly boring chore, but one she has to finish. A tiny but important bit of her career hangs on whether or not she gets the dates right, whether she spells the names correctly. 

He sings in the shower; hits all the wrong notes spectacularly well. And loudly.

*

This is how it ends, an indeterminable amount of time later.

He replaces the bath salt. The new jar is banana and quite obviously not of the same quality. 

She almost always asks him before tinkering with the TARDIS (and she always asks the TARDIS herself). He even gives her permission a few times.

She stops sitting in his favourite chair. It’s lumpy anyway, and smells like oil.

They can’t reconcile on the eggs, and switch to toast instead.

He helps her with her article, by materialising around key points in it. It has disastrous results and leads to many rewrites, but they run a lot, and it’s most certainly not dull.

He almost misses to pick up his new companion – thankfully she’s written it down. Things’ll be fine; he’s got someone again, and she should probably hand in her article.

He kisses her goodbye when she leaves, awkwardly but sincerely.

He stares after her when she walks away (he always does when she’s stayed a while); she knows he’s thinking about something, and she also knows he won’t ever tell her about what.


	6. Amy & Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've posted a version of this as a longer fic before, but, eh, I like this one too.

Hair cascading down the back of the chair, Amy shakes the table with a toe; the liquid in their glasses wobble sluggishly. She yawns.

It feels like some sort of blasphemy (and naturally then she has to say it). “I’m bored.” 

She slips a foot out of her trainer, stretches her leg and pokes the Doctor’s shoulder with a toe.

 

“Have I spoiled you?” the Doctor asked ruefully, a glint in his eye and a miniscule movement of the corner of his mouth. “All that running, hiding, fighting… Has it got to the point where you simply can’t sit still and enjoy a sunset?”

“I don’t think it can be called a sunset if all the sky does is change from one shade to another.”

“Then you’re not looking hard enough.”

 

When they sat down, the sky had been a deep blue-black oily richness; now it had slid over into inky blackness, something great and vast and bottomless, something that seemed to enrich and suck at her soul at the same time.

“My hands aren’t even chained to the chair.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees.

“And here I thought my delightful company was enough to keep you enthralled.” He says it with the same rueful, rich voice, but Amy properly startles, her elbows sliding on her bare knees. He looks like he’s joking, he sounds like he’s joking, but…


	7. Rory and Amy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A version of a ficlet I posted years ago.

Rory is a good person, always has been.

He was a good boy. He never complained when she wanted to spend every recess and weekend and holiday pretending to travel in time. He doesn’t say anything when he has come with her to the hospital (shrink #1) and she decides the ladies bathroom stalls would make perfect time machine boxes. Not even when he has to fling open a door and yell “Geronimo”.  
He doesn’t say anything when they’re caught and her aunt yells at him for encouraging the fantasy Amelia’s there to forget.

He never laughed at her – not once during that first year, when she flinched every time “zero” anything was mentioned.

He wanted to help her, and she let him. Until one day when she realised she couldn’t keep playing time machine anymore, and she pushed him away. (He wouldn’t leave her alone, no matter how much she fought him.)

He grew into a good man. He doesn’t call her less when she reveals her new job. If anything, he calls her more.

She tells herself she’ll return before she left, because otherwise it would mean he was waiting for her, stuck in Leadworth, and she knows all about that and how is that fair?

Sometimes the Doctor notices that Amy thinks about something with softer eyes than she ought to think about gorgeous planets or murderous monsters or the malfunctioning coil she’s holding, which makes it odd timing really. He reminds himself that twelve years plus two years is a decent amount of time for a human and wonders if there was perhaps something in Amy’s surroundings he didn’t look long enough at. 

And then he promptly forgets it.


	8. Mels and Amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mels and Amy, dialogue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mels and Amy, dialogue.

“You keep dressing Rory up as your Doctor.” 

“So?” 

“So? He’s barely pulling Rory off. Go down to the pub, find the hottest guy in there, and let _him_ wear the tattered shirt.”

“Mels!”

“Oh, sorry, the _funniest_ guy in there.”

“No.”

“I can get someone,” she says, making a gesture that could mean either choking or some serious groping, “just lend me the shirt.”


	9. Rory (AGMGTW)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rory, AGMGTW missing scene.

Rory was having stale-ish scones and loose-leaf tea in Victorian London. From the other side of the heavily-drawn window came the sounds of hooves and scrambling carriages and everything. He’d probably appreciated the ambiance more if he hadn’t been sharpening his sword with Jenny-the-maid’s whetstone. Jenny-the-maid, incidentally, was strapping her samurai swords onto her back

The Doctor is stone-faced and dark-eyed, and he’s taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. 

When the Doctor had said he had a plan for getting Amy back, Rory had thought, _oh, great, this will involve a paradox, some zany invention and possibly a teddy bear_. 

He’s kind of ashamed of that now. 

The Doctor is stone-faced and dark-eyed, has taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and he’s halfway onto Vastra’s maptable and halfway inside his 3D model.


	10. River/Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> River/Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I've posted a variant of this at some point, soz.

A half-drunken man stumbles down the street, away from a small explosion; the Doctor runs past him, up the street, toward the small explosion.

It comes from a pub, empty now, its door wide open. 

But there is no fire, and no smoke.

“It was just a noise bomb, Doctor.”

He turns, and there is River. Just standing there on the cobblestones, bag in hand.

“ _River_! he spits, and very nearly chokes on his reprimands.

She quirks her lips and hooks a thumb into the air. “Can a girl get a lift?”

 

*

“You set off a fake bomb!” 

“You run towards explosions. And I waited until everyone had left – well, except for the rude man who wouldn’t give me his seat.”

“What about the barman?”

“Out back.” She smiles, and he notices the remains of lipstick.

“Why?”

“I know you’re alone.”

“Well, I’m _not_!”

“No companion at the moment. Have you started talking to yourself yet?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Besides, I haven’t travelled with this you yet.”

*

“Don’t repair the TARDIS. Don’t repair the TARDIS without asking me! Just – don’t repair the TARDIS.”

“Feel free,” she says, “to vent your unrighterous anger and misplaced frustration, I couldn’t care less.”

 

*

She sits in his favourite armchair in her pyjamas and flips through her journal lazily.

He looks on miserably. “I’d rather you not flaunt that in my presence.”

“Just keep your hands off it, it’s not that hard.”

He turns around and leaves, and with a dull ache in his chest, she remembers that, yes, he used to find it hard, this early.

*

She’s brought a jar of her favourite bath salt; it smells divinely of strawberry and vanilla and would have cost her a ridiculous amount of money, had she not stolen it. He snatches it and uses it as a solvent in some obscure part of machinery River is quite certain he’s never ever needed.

*

She cooks breakfast – eggs Benedict – and he spits them out.

*

She’s working on an article, a mind-numbingly boring chore, but one she has to finish. A tiny but important bit of her career hangs on whether or not she gets the dates right, whether she spells the names correctly. 

He sings in the shower; hits all the wrong notes spectacularly well. And loudly.

*

This is how it ends, an indeterminable amount of time later.

He replaces the bath salt. The new jar is banana and quite obviously not of the same quality. 

She almost always asks him before tinkering with the TARDIS (and she always asks the TARDIS herself). He even gives her permission a few times.

She stops sitting in his favourite chair. It’s lumpy anyway, and smells like oil.

They can’t reconcile on the eggs, and switch to toast instead.

He helps her with her article, by materialising around key points in it. It has disastrous results and leads to many rewrites, but they run a lot, and it’s most certainly not dull.

He almost misses to pick up his new companion – thankfully she’s written it down. Things’ll be fine; he’s got someone again, and she should probably hand in her article.

He kisses her goodbye when she leaves, awkwardly but sincerely.

He stares after her when she walks away (he always does when she’s stayed a while); she knows he’s thinking about something, and she also knows he won’t ever tell her about what.


	11. Rory, Amy/Rory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rory, Amy/Rory

Rory is a good person, always has been.

He was a good boy. He never complained when she wanted to spend every recess and weekend and holiday pretending to travel in time. He doesn’t say anything when he has come with her to the hospital (psychiatrist #1) and she decides the ladies’ bathroom stalls would make perfect time machine boxes. Not even when he has to fling open a door and yell “Geronimo”.

He doesn’t say anything when they’re caught and her aunt yells at him for encouraging the fantasy Amelia’s there to forget.

He never laughed at her – not once during that first year, when she flinched every time “zero” anything was mentioned.

He wanted to help her, and she let him. Until one day when she realised she couldn’t keep playing time machine anymore, and she pushed him away. (He wouldn’t leave her alone, no matter how much she fought him.)

He grew into a good man. He doesn’t call her less when she reveals her new job. If anything, he calls her more.

She tells herself she’ll return before she left, because otherwise it would mean he was waiting for her, stuck in Leadworth, and she knows all about that and how is that fair?

Sometimes the Doctor notices that Amy thinks about something with softer eyes than she ought to need thinking about dangerous planets or murderous monsters or the malfunctioning coil she’s holding. He reminds himself that twelve years plus two years is a decent amount of time for a human and wonders if there was perhaps something in Amy’s surroundings he didn’t look long enough at. 

And then he promptly forgets it.


	12. Amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amy wanders.

Amy wanders. She’s not afraid of getting lost – if anything, she _wants_ to lose herself. She thinks of Rory too often, and explores the TARDIS to take her mind off of him, off of the event to come in the morning (indefinitely later, or perhaps earlier). Sometimes she forgets him completely for hours (though she tells herself it’s all right because those hours are spent doing things perhaps no human has ever done before) and sometimes he’s all she can think about, whether she wants to or not.

For the first time in a long time she feels she would like to talk to someone (a mate, not a psychiatrist), have a real proper talk about herself and what she’s thinking, feeling – just generally, you know, the words ‘wedding’ or ‘marriage’ wouldn’t have to be mentioned at all. Ironically, she’s stuck with an alien whom she’s caught three times since breakfast staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at some part of his ship.

The Doctor wouldn’t understand, would he? Promises, doubt, hopes, dreams, love… She isn’t sure he feels like she does, that he even has the same register of emotions.

 

She opens a door at random, because she feels a vague desire to do so, and steps into a fully furnished sitting room – but it contains nothing but bits and bobs. This and that. Stuff. Things are on shelves, tables, chairs, the floor, as haphazard and random as the rest of the ship. Mind you, though, there’s something about this particular room that makes Amy want to tread softly, something about the lighting. She closes the door behind her and makes her way to the closest table, carefully stepping over a pair of worn heels, a ball of twine, and a baseball bat. 

There’s a serene quality to the lighting and the sound in here, something she hasn’t noticed anywhere else. She closes the door behind her and makes her way to the closest table, carefully stepping over a pair of heels and a baseball bat. The table is round and brown and wooden. Amy pokes about the contents spread out over it; she has seen bits and bobs in her life, but this is taking it to a whole new level. There’s a small pile of newspaper cuttings, all by the same author (a Sarah Jane Smith), and among them was an ancient blurry photograph depicting a man in a kilt and a waving girl. A Christie mystery lay next to a mobile, its shell blackened and twisted.

A wroughtiron chair next to the table held a pink hoodie draped across its back and a crumpled drawing of a broken clockface with long hair and a hat propped up against it.

.Why would he save all these things? They have no value of the kind she’s surmised the Doctor likes. The mobile couldn’t possibly work; the articles weren’t scientific; the book was just an ordinary paperback, thumbed and dog-eared. Was this a room where things somehow ended up, like a sieve? Things that ought to have been in the library, in the wardrobe, in the rubbish? Somehow Amy knows this isn’t so.

She thinks about Rory again. Constant, dependable Rory… Rory who’d torn his Sunday shirt and stolen his father’s best tie to please her.


	13. A bit of Clara preg!fic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a WIP.

_Ow_ , Clara thinks. She also thinks _food poisoning_ , but not very much else. Why should she think anything else? There was no possible reason for her to think anything else, except one, and she was definitely not thinking… that.

Ugh. She coughs, making her stomach and throat burn even worse. She wants her Mum and Dad, but they hadn’t been there for a long time. She was an orphan and she was used to vomiting alone (not often, please and thank you). Where was the wheezing and groaning of the TARDIS now she actually needed a doctor? Nowhere to be seen that’s where, because it was a Thursday.

Outside of her loo and her flat and her building, the sun was rising, people were turning on their lights and their kettles and their televisions, and Clara was meant to be sleeping in. Always did, usually. Except today she was half-awake, half-asleep, crumpled around the toilet with her forehead on a seat that smelled more of plastic and less of the lemony fresh goo she used to clean it. That’s more than anyone wanted to know but there you go. Her body warmth is slowly seeping out into the tiles on the floor via her naked legs and things are generally not top notch. She didn’t have time to turn on the light and her bathroom hasn’t got a window.

_Our heroine_ , the story went, miss _Clara. She young and petite and curvy with big brown eyes and a little button of a nose and the ghost of a messy braid curling and tangling its way down the back of her neck_. She’s currently also very pale-faced and bleary-eyed and possibly possibly-not single. Let’s not mention the semi-conscious vomiting or the darkness.

She wipes a trace of sick off her chin with the back of a hand. Thursday. Of course it was. Reality always felt more real on Thursdays, and that’s why she needed the lie-ins.

You wanted to see the stars, she reminds herself – she used to wake up yawning every day; bored-yawning, not tired-yawning, and then she’d met the Doctor. Every Wednesday, without fault, or at least not any she’s noticed, somewhere between eight and nine in the morning, he picks her up in his blue box time machine and lets her choose where to go, when to go, and what to do. That was the theory. In actuality… it wasn’t ever that, but it wasn’t his fault most of the time. Yesternight was definitely the last time she listened to “it’s non-toxic, Clara, safe to eat or drink maybe”, though. The Doctor will simply have to come after lunch or stop at the chip shop first from now on. Ought to vomit on him to drive the point home.

The nausea stops an hour or so later, except it feels like four or five, and Clara stands up with the grace of a newborn foal with frozen kneecaps and smacks the wall until she hits the light switch. The sudden brightness hurts her brain. _No more liquid doughnuts from New Rome_ , she thinks, trembling as she grabs cold-sweaty fistfuls of her oversized night t-shirt and peels it off. She pointedly avoids looking into the mirror, stares at her blue toe nails instead.

While she’s waiting for the shower to make the water very very very warm, she splays her fingers across her abdomen. Her entire middle really hurts. Food poisoning, she thinks. That was the reason.

Yep.

She was so definitely not pregnant.

 

 

You know that thing where there’s something you have to do and you don’t really want to so you push it down but it keeps gnawing at the back of your mind?

Yeah, Clara’s ignoring that thing with all she’s got.

 

She throws up on Friday too, at the exact same moment as her alarm goes off in the bedroom. It might as well be on the moon… after an hour or so on the bathroom floor, it becomes white noise sloshing about in her aching skull.

Saturday and Sunday she keeps a bucket near the bed, and a pot of strong tea tucked inside all of her tea cosies on the nightstand.

Monday she thinks she’s free of it because stomach bugs never last very long and she hopes one from the Kingdom of the Nine Moons doesn’t either.

In her favourite red dress and her Doc Martens and only feeling slightly like a wrung-out kitchen towel she’s all ready to go to the nursery – it’s her job, though it barely feels like one, because it’s a nursery and Clara’s forever good with kids – but she’s barely stepped outside the door when the nausea rises like the tide and it’s turn-on-heels and into the bathroom.

It’s better in the afternoon; always better in the afternoon. Clara’s rummaging through her tea box, trying to find the bag that appeals to her the most. She’s humming, a bit; it’s shrill, might be verging on desperate. Outside, it’s sunny and bright and colourful and nothing can get to her because, as the Doctor says, face-eating spiders only come out when it’s dark.

This is the point when the phone rings.

It’s a pink lump in between two empty cups, the three of them taking up the entire bedstand; every signal makes the spoons vibrate a little further away from where they started.

Her phone rings a lot. Not that it didn’t ring a lot before, but it’s really started to ring a lot a lot since she met the Doctor. When she picks up, she mostly gets either a dial tone or someone hanging up. Sometimes a woman speaks, a hoarse older woman, always asking the same thing, broken record warning: “Is the Doctor there?” “No, he isn’t,” Clara always answers, “And who’re you?”

The woman never says, just sniffle-breathes in Clara’s ear. In her head, Clara always asks, _Why are you ringing me? Why_ me? But she never makes her lips actually form the words, just… rolls her eyes and hangs up. Okay, sometimes she hangs up and then rolls her eyes, but never anything else.

Sometimes, though, it’s one of her mates. Sometimes, very rarely, it’s the Doctor.

She lifts the receiver and lodges it between ear and shoulder, still going through her teas. “Hello?”

It’s the woman, of course it is, and she sniffles and breathes hoarsely for a while and a half before speaking, and then she says, “You’d better get a test.”

Tuesday Clara faces her fears and exchanges a crumpled fiver for a p test wrapped in shiny cardboard and creaky plastic.

The chemists always seems to smell like hospital and penicillin, even though it doesn’t at all. Like Dad’s fear, Mum’s tiredness, like all the time they lost, the three of them. She bit her lip and smiled half-heartedly at the other people in queue, at the bored cashier, thinking, _Yeah, so what if I’m pregnant with a half Time Lord half echo of an impossible girl? So what_. Her business, wasn’t it, except they couldn’t care less whether or not she was buying the test to pee on or stir her tea with, so really she was probably saying it to herself. That maybe she was headed for “three of them” again.

She walks home with the test in hand, the receipt wrapped around it so that only a bit of “pr” and “est” is visible, shiedling the truth of what it is from no one in particular.

Her dress is light blue and has summer flowers on it, even though the colours of autumn are sparking everywhere; great big leaves in reds and oranges and yellows breaking free and flying wild or carpeting the pavement.

And here is where the story starts.


	14. River, TenII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate scene from the River in Pete's World series.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate scene from the [River in Pete's World series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/18251).

The lights burst on, drench the room in brightness. 

“So, what do you need? An arm? A head?”

She adjusts the ID card on the lapel of her expensive suit, and makes sure the sleeve of her jacket covers the vortex manipulator. “I’ll just look around, if that’s all right.”

River’s worked hard to get here, and she’s going to take her time.

Torchwood keeps all its Cybertech in a cellar: shelf after shelf and table after table of Cybertech; EarPods, bundles of wire, piles of hands, pieces of armour, anything and everything. Haphazardly – standing or lying or teetering – and everywhere are empty Pringles tubes and dozens and dozens of mugs. She approaches the closest table and looks closer at something that’s probably a knee joint.

The scientific advisor is called John, and has perfectly unkempt hair shaping itself into a stiff, silvery peak, and a brilliant smile. When he’d finally showed up, he’d come with a spark plug in one hand and a plastic cup in the other, and he’d looked at her as if he knew everything about her. For a fraction of a second River hadn’t been able to breathe, and then she’d remembered – Time Lords don’t have alternate selves.

“If you have any questions, just ask,” he says. “I can answer anything.” There’s something studiously blank about his expression. “So. Melody. That’s a nice name.”

“Mm.” She points to the joint. “Is this intact?” 

“Yup.” 

Those of her senses that are human plus are running alternately hot and cold. She reaches out to him, repeatedly, but there’s nothing there. She shakes her head; she really should be able to spend a few hours in an alternate universe without projecting a lover onto the first man who happened to thrum with energy. 

“No one comes here but me,” he says, and there’s no mistaking the pride in his voice. He slips his hands into his pockets and breathes deeply, as if the smell of oil is oxygen. “Only place they’ll leave me alone. Which is, of course, inherently ironic.”

Energy or not, there’s a resignation in him that makes her want to slap him. “Haven’t you got someplace to live?”

“Oh, yes. Got a flat. Open-planned. And a telescope. And Rose. Last week we investigated Yeti, liked that. And you, are you from here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” He smiles, and the smile itself is rather sweet – but at the same time, his eyes darken, his wrinkles deepen. 

The Doctor makes that expression when he’s suspicious, so River looks as calm as she possibly can. “I like to travel.”

He blinks the darkness away. Grins. “You travel lightly. Haven’t got a bag or a lunchbox or a spotter’s guide… or something?”

“I don’t need much.” She pushes a half-full cup of stone-cold tea out of the way, reaches for a mouthpiece.

 

She’s gathered what she needs; a decent pile of disembodied Cyberparts.

He sloppily writes down what she’s taken on the back of a Tesco’s receipt (for “Pete and the archivist”), and then he crams the parts into a red plastic bag, and covers them with a tea-stained envelope.

 

He’s rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. “The tech… that’s what you’re here for? Nothing else?”

She grins. “You can buy me a cup of coffee.”

He sighs, wiggles his fingers in his pockets. Now he looks at her as if he knows nothing about her. “How did you get here? No, don’t answer that. Don’t tell me that. Why do you have a gun? Answer that.” 

“No, I won’t answer that.”

The bag is bulging and heavy and the handle digs into her fingers, but it’ll definitely be worth it.


	15. River, TenII, Rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snippets of deleted scenes from the River in Pete's World series.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snippets of deleted scenes from the River in Pete's World series.

“Do you know him?” asks Rose, across her desk.

“No”, says River, and she swears the truth tastes weird. “Never met him.” The Doctor was a field of study she’d never complete, yes, but this came at a bad time. John had said the Doctor had left him there… but if he was the Doctor? Then again; rule one.

“In this world, this universe?” continues Rose, almost pleadingly. “No one’s heard of the Doctor. Now he’s here, and we need him.”

River focuses on her scratchy shirt, the annoying itch under the bandage, the line of un-smudged concealer below Rose’s left eye. She knew all about needing the Doctor.

 

She’s in Rose’s bathtub, cheekbones-deep in foam, waiting for a creamy face mask to wash off the eyeliner Torchwood’s bought-by-the-vat liquid soap couldn’t get. Waiting for someone else to decide what to do with her. Story of her life.

“So she got out of Torchwood,” said John, from the direction of the kitchen. “That doesn’t mean I helped her.”

“I told you,” said Rose, “bring home as many as you want, I said, but don’t bring them to my flat!”

“But yours is bigger than mine!”

 

“They don’t understand.” He strokes the right side of his chest absently. “They can’t smell it, taste it, hear it. And this manipulator of yours…” He looks down at his hands, turns them over. “Quality work.”

“Do you have a point?”

“Get out,” he says. He tosses her the manipulator, blackened shell patched with office tape. “It works. And, no, I didn’t take it for a test drive –” he heaved a gargantuan sigh – “but it works, promise.”

“But –”

“I’ll face the music. Just jump. Please.”


End file.
